


Thaw

by Aerrin



Category: Marvel (Movies), Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Red Room
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-03
Updated: 2012-09-03
Packaged: 2017-11-13 12:17:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/503462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aerrin/pseuds/Aerrin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Love is for children. Natasha learned that a long time ago.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thaw

**Author's Note:**

> I've spent far too much time thinking about what 'I've been compromised' means in relation to this character, and thinking about it in connection to Natasha's claim that love is for children. This is my take on it.

Natalia is five years old the first time she falls in love.

He appears out of the fire, her guardian angel wreathed in flame as he comes to save her. Ivan Petrovitch is young and strong and oh so handsome as he scoops her up from the soot and ashes where she sits crying. He wraps a cloth around her face to protect against the smoke and carries her outside as if it is nothing, and she clings to him, buries her face in his shirt, and cries with the breathless, heaving sobs of a terrified child.  His hand is solid against her back, his voice is low and soothing as he murmurs reassurances into her ear, and when he promises to take her someplace safe and warm and buy her a pretty new dress, she is lost to him.

The Red Room is not all that Natalia was promised. There are no pretty dresses here, and the dormitory where she is kept with a dozen other girls is often cold enough that they have to chip ice from the bathroom sink when they wake in the morning. But it is safe, and if Natalia is very, very good, there are rewards. Sometimes it is Ivan who brings them.

He smuggles her bits of cake ( _chocolate is her favorite, moist and rich like something out of a fairy tale_ ) and shiny trinkets ( _sometimes it is a necklace; sometimes the sharp blade of a knife sized to her small hands_ ) and words of praise ( _you are special, Natalia, such promise, such a good girl_ ).

She yearns to please him. Everything in her aches for it, and so when they tell her _again_ and _repeat_ and _again_ , she pulls herself up from the floor and wipes the blood away from her brow and falls into the ready crouch as she eyes the girl three years older and twenty pounds heavier who is her opponent.

Eventually she is given her own room and an extra blanket. They tell her it is a reward for her quick progress, but she knows that they are afraid to leave her in the room with the others. She is already a match for most of them, but they outnumber her by far and more than one pair of hungry eyes has noticed how she has become Petrovitch’s favorite.

She is not the only girl he has carried away to this place. She is not the only one who falls asleep at night dreaming of ways to please him, of hearing his quiet voice say _good_ and _yes_ and _I am proud._

She is the only girl who ever watches her dreams come true, and they hate her for it.

 

\--------

Natalia is thirteen years old the second time she falls in love.

Inna is sixteen and has been working in the field for two years now. She is strong and tall, with dark chestnut hair that falls down her back in a sleek, straight waterfall.  The first time Natalia sees Inna as she is rushed down the hallway on a stretcher, she wants nothing so much as to tangle her fingers in it.

No one in the Red Room is happy with Inna. The job should have been straightforward. The mark likes young girls, slender and supple and so easy to control. But Inna pulled the knife and then balked, and he beat her black and blue with the force of fists and feet. The Red Room stitched the cuts across her brow and bound her broken ribs, and everyone whispered how lucky she was that he hadn’t ruined her face. How would she ever work again, if he had?

They send Natalia to her on the mats. In the Red Room, you learn to fight through the pain, because there will always be pain and there will always be work. She doesn’t pull her punches, because they will know if she does. The first time she slides her fingers into Inna’s hair, it is to pull her head backward and slam it against the wall while she takes the older girl’s feet out from under her with an ease so thoughtless that it’s almost insulting.

For three months, they fight wordlessly under the watchful gaze of the Red Room. For three months, Natalia only touches her in violence, and she grows to love the look in Inna’s eyes every time she takes her to the mat. Defiance. Anger. Respect.

As Inna heals, the tables begin to turn. The older girl pins her to the floor more and more frequently. Natalia tries not to mind, but she feels the heat behind her own eyes as she looks up at Inna. Defiance. Anger. Respect.

“Why didn’t you kill him?” Natalia asks one day with words soft enough to be lost in the pour of the shower. Inna is startled, and she looks at Natalia with eyes that are much, much older, and does not answer. Natalia steps closer, slides her fingers through that unbelievable hair, wraps one arm around the other girl with the warm press of skin against skin through the steam. “I would have killed him for you,” she whispers. Inna says nothing, but she dips her head and cups Natalia’s cheek with a careful hand and presses their lips together with a dark, desperate longing.

Inna is gone the next day. At lunch, she hears the whispers, and they come with sidelong, wary glances in her direction. _Reprogrammed_. It is the first time she hears the word.

 

\------

Natalia is fifteen the third time she falls in love.

He is American, and she hates him with everything in her. He sees it when he stands in front of her, and an angry fire kindles in her belly when he responds with a laugh. He turns to Ivan beside him and says, “She’ll do.”

She is left alone with him, and she stands still and straight in the center of the room as she has been taught, but her eyes glare defiance. He stops in front of her, meeting her gaze with a mild curiosity that leaves her disconcerted.

“You don’t like me much, do you?”

“You are American,” she spits in answer.

“I am your teacher.”

“I should have been in the field a year ago!”

“You are not ready.”

Natalia does not answer, but she knows he can see the rebellion in her eyes because the backhanded blow he gives her in response sends her staggering and it’s all she can do to keep her feet. She curses herself in silence, and her cheeks grow hot with anger.

His voice is quiet and even when he speaks. “Hate me if you must. But do not ever show it to me.”

His English is perfect, American, and some part of her tracks the lilt of his accent and the cadence of his words.

“Show me love, Natalia. Show me desire and longing. When I look at you, and all I see is love, then maybe you will be ready.”

She is his, then. Every day he takes her, and some days it is the finer points of firearms ( _he is the best sniper she has ever seen_ ) and some days it is the mats ( _his metal arm crashes into her like a train, and every day it is a struggle not to limp, not to cry)_ and some days it is long conversations in English while he corrects her slang and her accent and the way she looks at him while they talk ( _with interest, Natalia, keep up, you are better than this_ ).

In the cafeteria, she feels the jealous eyes again and she hears their names paired in whispers. _Natalia_ , they murmur, _and the Winter Soldier._  Now she is fifteen and a woman and she knows enough to be proud.

She tells him about Inna. Her words are quiet, but her accent is perfect when she confesses her confusion to him. She does not tell him about her long chestnut hair or the feel of soft lips against hers, but she knows he can read much of it in her eyes when she says, “I don’t know why she didn’t kill him.”

“She was weak, Natalia.” He takes her hand in his and brings it to his chest with a solid thump. “Here. Where it counts. Her body was strong, her aim was good, but she did not have what you have.”

Her hand rests against the warmth of his chest, and she feels like she doesn’t dare to breathe.

“Your heart, Natalia, it is stronger than fists or guns. But you must learn to harness it. Everything under your control. Everything a weapon. This is what I am teaching you.”

With her hand under his and her fingers curled against the fabric of his shirt, Natalia looks up at her teacher, and for the first time there is nothing in her gaze but love.

He stops breathing, just for a moment, and Natalia can feel it, and it takes everything she has in her to keep the smile of triumph from spreading across her face. It is a small victory, that catch of his breath, but it feels like the most important one she has ever had.

Their lessons go on for weeks, and sometimes Natalia cannot tell whether this surge of emotion in her chest when she teases free a smile or uses the force of an attack to pin him flat against the mats is real or imagined.

When he comes to her at night, it doesn’t matter. She is tentative at first, when he whispers her name and slides his hand across the curve of her hip to pull her into him. She watches him with wariness and with longing, and that feeling grows tight in her chest again when he finally lowers his lips to hers in the darkness.

He is slow and careful and more gentle with her in this than anything she has known since she was five years old, and she loves him for it. When his breath catches in his throat again and then escapes in a low groan, she feels an exhilarating rush of power.

She spends the first night exploring all the ways she can use this new weapon he has handed her, and he teaches her in kind, and it is the best present she has ever been given.

Every night he comes, and every night is different. She is shy and coquettish, she is fierce and wild, he is gentle, he is brutal, he is lost inside her. And Natalia still cannot tell whether this surge of emotion in her chest is real or imagined.

 

\-------- 

They set her loose on the world, and she is glorious. She is bright and fierce and deadly, but her real gift is how easily she slips into someone else’s life. Men circle her like moths to a flame, and she is whatever they need her to be.

He comes to her again a year later, a dark figure waiting in her hotel room, and she almost puts a bullet in his head before he says “ _Natalia_ ” and she drops her weapons and her pretenses and bears him back into the bed like a woman starving.

Now she is sure, at last, finally. When she wakes in the morning she sees the dark tangle of his hair on her pillow and she smiles, and she knows it is real.

 

\-------- 

They never have long. He steals hours away, sometimes days, and he shows up whenever she doesn’t expect him. Months pass between visits, sometimes longer, but he whispers secrets to her in the dark and she knows that it’s much less for him, her frozen lover.

She learns to live with an aching hope in her chest, and she uses it to fuel her anger and her desire and her thirst for the blood of the men she’s sent to kill. She is the Black Widow, and she leaves corpses behind her like bread crumbs, and her marks never believe that someone so young and so beautiful and so fragile can be so deadly.

Natalia is nineteen when her Winter Soldier creeps into the window of the apartment Nadine Reinhardt has rented for three months. There is something in his gaze and the urgency of his touch that scares her, but she can’t place it until the next morning when he looks at her over a cup of strong black coffee and calls her Natasha and asks her to come away with him.

She is disbelieving and she is halfway through an important infiltration and she’s embedded in a deep cover she’s spent months building and when he goes away again, there is resignation in his eyes.

 

\-------- 

The next time she sees him it is on the streets in Moscow, and he does not recognize her. She slips through the alleys and follows him to the small room he’s renting and climbs through his window as he has climbed through hers so many nights before. He looks the same, tall and dark and stronger than any man has the right to be, and the blow of his metal fist is like a train when it hits her stomach. It takes every inch of her skill to put him flat on his back and make it out the window before he can rise to hit her again.

When she returns to the Red Room for her next assignment, they are waiting for her, and they lead her toward a room that has always been locked. She doesn’t hear anyone whisper it, but the word rises in her mind anyway. _Reprogrammed_.

Ivan is there. His hands are gentle as he urges her into the chair and wraps the restraints tight around her wrists.

“He cried out your name, Natalia,” he tells her. “Over and over again, he called for you. Why did he do that? Why did he expect you to come?”

Natalia is silent in the face of his questions, and her brain is fuzzy with whatever cocktail of drugs they have given her.

“You should know better, _любимый_. There are lines we do not cross.” Ivan’s touch is gentle against her cheek as she loses consciousness.

 

\-------- 

She is Oksana, dancing every day until she dances her way into the right man’s heart and puts a bullet in his head.

 

\-------- 

She is Marina, and she is brash and bold and she is not scared of the men who deal in guns and they love her for it, right until she takes them apart one by one and returns their goods to her employers.

 

\-------- 

She is Charlotte, and she is terrified, and he never sees the garotte that slips around his neck, and even as she pulls it tight to snap his neck, he never believes it could be her.

 

\-------- 

She is Maria, and she is seductive, and no one questions it when she slips into the back room with the most powerful man at the party; she is Sabrina, and they will tell her whatever she wants to know because she is only a silly girl; she is Mandy, and they catch her where she should not be, and they beat her and cut her and threaten pain, and when she throws one out the window and snaps the other’s neck after they tell her everything, she smiles.

She is Yvette and she is Sophie and she is Claire and she is Lauren and she is _Natalia._ She is Natalia for one brief, bright moment, and it is all she needs.

 

\-------- 

Natalia is almost twenty-one when she realizes a truth and corners her first love in his bedroom. She crawls into his bed and straddles him, sensuous and young and beautiful. She smiles at him with longing and desire and sees him look up at her with the same just before she glides her knife across his throat. Her hand fastens across his mouth to muffle his dying screams and she bends close to murmur it into his ear.

_“Love is for children. I will not be foolish again.”_

\-------- 

They come to her before she can escape the apartment, and she knows now that it was a miscalculation, a petty desire for vengeance, and it may have cost her everything.

 And she is Naomi and she is Olivia and she is Marta and she is Emily and she is Grace and she is Iskra and she is _Natalia Natalia Natalia.  
_

This time she gives no room to her vengeance. When she breaks free of the cloud, she disappears beyond their reach, and she is Natasha, and she trusts no one and they try, but they cannot get close to her again.

\-------- 

When he corners her with an arrow leveled at her throat, there is nothing but relief in her eyes, and when he demands her name, it is a struggle to remember which one to give him.

Her smile is triumphant when she meets his gaze and says, “I am Natasha Romanoff, and I am prepared to die.”

She can’t quite name what she sees in his eyes as he lowers his bow and lifts a hand to his ear. His voice is steady and decisive when he says, “Coulson. I’m bringing her in.”

 

\-------- 

Natasha is twenty-eight when she falls in love for the fourth time.

“Is this _love_ , Agent Romanoff?”

The look in Loki’s eyes is positively enraptured with the possibility, and she feels that aching tug in her chest again as she considers what he’s done to Clint.

Her arms are tight across her chest, and her voice is full of dismissal as she answers. “Love is for children. I owe him a debt.”

 

\-------- 

It takes six months for SHIELD to declare that they have deprogrammed her as far as they are able. Her memories are a fuzzy haze, and the words hang over her like a shadow.

_As far as they are able.  
_

Natasha knows that they can never be sure. There could be a switch, a dozen switches hidden so deep in her brain that they will never know they are there until someone from the Red Room speaks the right words and activates it. _  
_

No one should trust her. Her loyalty is shaky enough without the complications. _  
_

But he does. _  
_

It is Clint’s voice arguing that gets her into the field again, and the first time they go out together she is intensely aware of him at her back. It’s an uncomfortable feeling, to rely on someone else. Her shoulderblades itch, and she has to stop herself from rolling them uncomfortably as she steps into the party she knows he is already watching. _  
_

When everything goes according to plan and they walk out with a drive full of information on a rising drug cartel and not a single dead body in their wake, SHIELD starts to relax. _  
_

Natasha does not. _  
_

She spends long hours with Clint in planes and buses and hotel rooms, and she comes to know him better than she has ever known anyone outside of herself. His favorite flavor of ice cream is chocolate and he has a childish weakness for cotton candy. He loves the twang of his bow, but he’s more competent with a sniper rifle than any man she’s ever met save one. He leads on his kicks, but not on his punches, and he doesn’t ever underestimate the damage she can do.

He doesn’t read much, but he likes audio books on long stakeouts and will listen to anything from Harry Potter to westerns. Sometimes he’ll hand her an ear bud and they’ll listen to thrillers with frequent pauses to criticize technique or tactics and Natasha learns that she still remembers how to laugh.

And one day she looks up and she realizes that she is comfortable here. Her shoulder blades have stopped itching. She works secure in the knowledge that he knows exactly where to be, and she expects him to be there.

She realizes that it’s not just Clint who trusts her. SHIELD seems to have come to an understanding, and they don’t hesitate to send her out on sensitive jobs. No one gives her wary looks in the hallway. They hand her new recruits and ask her to evaluate their abilities.

She almost trusts herself. _  
_

And one day she looks up and Clint’s looking back at her, and she recognizes that look in his eyes, and she turns away and pretends that she doesn’t, because love is for children. She will not be a fool again.

\-------- 

_Is this love, Agent Romanoff?_

She sits across from him, waiting for him to wake up. She’s desperate to see if there’s still Clint behind those eyes, and she feels it again, that thing she has been fighting for years.

She owes him her life a hundred times over, for shots taken and the shot not taken and at least one he’s taken _for_ her.

She owes him _herself._ For her ability to smile and to laugh and to fall into a sound sleep as long as he’s there to watch her back. She owes him seven years of freedom, and yet when she looks at him, nothing really feels like debt.

It feels like something she thought she had killed in herself a long, long time ago.

It expands in her chest until she can’t breathe. And then he opens his eyes and they’re not blue but they’re still so dark and full of shadows. She has to turn away before she can speak.  She tells him, “You gotta level out. It’s gonna take time.”

And when he settles next to her and asks her in that voice what Loki did to her, the whole world seems to stand still.

 _He named it_ , she wants to say. _He made it true.  
_

She doesn’t look at him. Instead she says, “I’ve been compromised.”

What she means is, _I love you._

\-------- 

The world is thinking about ending, and that’s kind of convenient for Natasha because it keeps them all busy. She’s spent her entire life learning to channel fear into her work, and what is love but another kind of fear?

She uses it as she fights with Clint at her back, and she clings tight to it when she makes a suicidal leap for the nearest Chitauri vehicle, and she wraps her fist hard around it as she stares toward the sky and waits for Tony Stark.

When it’s all over, every part of her aches and she feels like she could sleep for years. Still, this is a send off none of them want to miss, and so she slides into the car with Clint and they lapse into comfortable silence and they stand in Central Park and watch everyone disappear in their opposite directions.

And then it’s just the two of them, and when Natasha turns to look up at him she sees something darker in his eyes than she has ever seen before. Her gut twists as she recognizes the shadows there ( _do you know what it is to be unmade?)_ , and in the flicker of that moment she knows a new truth: _  
_

_I will do anything to keep this man whole._

She turns to him in the sunshine and lifts a hand to his cheek and pushes herself up to meet his lips in a kiss as soft as the summer breeze. He looks at her like he’s dreaming, like he’s still wrapped in Loki’s dark cloud, and he whispers, “ _Nat_ ” and then “ _Tasha_ ,” with a half-broken voice.

She shakes her head and pulls him down to her with nothing but love in her eyes and she whispers it to him with a fool’s grin.

And with a spreading smile, he whispers it back.

 


End file.
